


There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

by StarkAstarte



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 13:15:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/pseuds/StarkAstarte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a hunger in Dean Winchester that is never satisfied.<br/>There is an emptiness inside of me that no amount of Grace will ever fill.<br/>We are hollow vessels, from which nothing escapes, into which many helpless things fall, never to be seen again.<br/>We are the same, he and I. This human child who wanders, lost and enraged, and his broken angel whose wings are more shadow than light. We are drawn to each other like flame to holy oil. We are repelled by the very thing that seems to magnetize us....</p><p>Castiel will do whatever it takes to make an irrevocable emotional connection with Dean. But will his clever plan work, or will it backfire catastrophically like all of his plans seem to do?</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

**Author's Note:**

> This story is Canon, but takes place during a non-specific time-period I haven't yet identified. I will reference any and all events and time-lines that come up, as well as diverging into an AU storyline. Just a heads-up! Also, this is my first Supernatural fic!

The first time I touched Dean Winchester, he wasn’t the only one who was burned.

His skin was a match that lit my hand up like a torch to light our way. The places where our flesh touched fused together, and the tearing away was terrible. Part of me is still attached. It was the most painful thing I have ever felt, and I have killed my own kind. I have slit their skin suits and spilled their light like incandescent blood. I have so much Grace on my hands it will never wholly evaporate. And still, to take my hand away from the shoulder of Dean Winchester is the closest thing to dying I have ever known. I left my mark on him, angry, red, and shining. The mark he left on me is too profound to be given shape. No physical contour will ever describe his hold on me. God has yet to invent such a shape. Adam himself could not give it a name, not in a thousand years of Sundays.

I thought being an angel would protect me. I don’t know why. It’s never protected anyone else who fell for a human and then kept on falling. Being an angel isn’t armour. It’s having just enough rope with which to do absolutely nothing but tie my hands to his.

 

Angels aren’t really men or women. More light than flesh, more shadow than bone, angels are Nothing and Everything all at once. We take on flesh the way meaning takes on language: to make ourselves clear. To delineate and simplify what can never be seen let alone understood by human perspective.

When I became a man, I thought very little about the choice I was making. When he first met me, Dean Winchester called me Junkless. Little he knew how accurate that qualification was, then. Little I knew how painfully _in_ accurate it was to become. Because of the meat-suit I wore. Because of Dean himself, and all the things he woke in me that I still don’t understand. And the ways in which we intersected, though we weren’t even from the same Hemisphere let alone of the same species.

I wonder now, had I chosen to wear the flesh and bone of a woman, what would Dean Winchester have called me? Certainly not Junkless. Women don’t have junk, according to his extremely unconventional sense of chivalry. Sweetheart, he might have called me. Baby, perhaps, if we were somewhere he thought the Impala couldn’t “hear”. Any one of a dozen manipulative terms of endearment tailor-made to get me out of my trenchcoat and into his rent-by-the-hour bed-of-iniquity—and I would have sucked them from his lips like a starving cur, of that I have no doubt. What wouldn’t I have agreed to, when the flesh I borrowed began to tingle in confusing ways, when his eyes looked at me in that predatory way I have witnessed so many times when a woman of the right proportions and blood-alcohol level matching his own stumbles into his line of sight?

There is a hunger in Dean Winchester that is never satisfied.

There is an emptiness inside of me that no amount of Grace will ever fill.

We are hollow vessels, from which nothing escapes, into which many helpless things fall, never to be seen again.

We are the same, he and I. This human child who wanders, lost and enraged, and his broken angel whose wings are more shadow than light. We are drawn to each other like flame to holy oil. We are repelled by the very thing that seems to magnetize us. Junkless, he used to say, snorting with derision. But he knew it wasn’t true. If it was, he would have felt far less threatened. If I truly was junkless, I would terrify him so much less. I would terrify him not at all. I would have no weapon he feaIf this body belonged to me, I would take my knife and cut away the places that make him flinch when I stand too close and look at him in a certain way. A way I cannot seem to help. I would cut and cut and cut until I was nothing at all. Until what was left of me could be scuffed at and kicked away, like leaves clinging for an inconsequential moment to Dean Winchester’s boot before drifting into the void from whence I came and into which we must all be pulled in our time and turn.

 

I have not been back to my Favourite Heaven since I killed all the angels who used to stand with me inside of it. That Eternal Tuesday Afternoon I once loved so well is an empty place now. All of Heaven is an emptier place, thanks to me. Nevertheless, I have found myself a new corner, a neglected patch of Paradise where things are not quite as they should be. Just the way I like it. The Last Day of Laura Jean LaMotte’s Childhood is my perfect refuge.

The girl who shouldn’t be here crouches in the long grass of the meadow, fascinated by something I can’t see from where I’m standing. Perhaps she, too, follows the bees. I can think of worse eternities, hereafters much less sweet. Her dress is yellow, her knees skinned and scabby, her feet bare and her hair wild as a nest meant for squabbling birds. She looks happy in ways I can only imagine. Ways I will never be, even if I ever manage to deserve it. Her skinny arms are wrapped around her knees, and her dark eyes slide back and forth, her lower lip tucked between the gap in her front teeth. It’s the place where she lost her first tooth in July of 1986. I know. I was there. There is nothing more priceless than children’s teeth, tucked beneath pillows. There is no gold worth the exchange. And yet they, in their infinite wisdom, trade them for dimes and quarters.

I sit down beside her in the grass, my trenchcoat tugged in close around me. It’s always breezy in her Heaven. It ruffles my feathers so badly I have to spend an hour grooming them back into place. Sometimes I let her do it. She has a real thing for wings. She has a little silver comb, and she likes to spit on it to get it wet. Says the feathers do whatever she wants when they’re damp. Claims she learned it from the geese. Disgusting, but I’ve tolerated much worse.

“Do you remember me?” I ask her.

She shrugs. Which is more of an acknowledgement than I received the last time I was here, which for her could have been yesterday or not for a thousand years more. Time is funny in Heaven. It practically doesn’t exist. And yet, it is the only thing that does. Sometimes I think God Himself is Time. Not a particularly original idea, but one I’ve held onto, nonetheless. It's as good a definition as any, for either one.

“I’m Castiel. I was standing beside your mother’s hospital bed the day you were born.”

She doesn’t even look at me. “So?”

“So, I remember you. I remember every moment of your life, even the parts that haven’t happened yet. There is nothing about you I don’t know.”

“Yeah, and?” She can be really snotty when she wants to be. Not one of her more attractive traits. She reminds me of a certain easily-irritated man who loves processed meat and guns I will not name. Rhymes with “mean”, but isn’t. Not really. Not unless he has to be.

“ _And_ that means I know you aren’t supposed to be here, Laura Jean. Not yet. You came early, and that’s against the rules.”

Her eyes dart over at me for a second, and she looks nervous, finally. I don’t push it, because she could bolt at any moment. I don’t want to have to chase her. This is her Heaven. Chasing her would be unforgivably rude, even for me. “What are you looking at?” I ask her more gently, leaning in to get a better view.

She rolls her eyes, but I can tell she’s trying not to smile. “Can’t you see them? I thought you were an angel. They’re _fairies_ , dummy.”

“Yes, I’m an angel,” I tell her, frowning. “The reason I can’t see them is that fairies don’t exist.”

“Oh, now look what you did,” she says softly, her brow knitting in concern. She pokes at something invisible in the grass. “You’ve killed one. You’d better take it back, quick!”

“This is Heaven,” I tell her. “Nothing can die in Heaven, even things that don’t exist.”

She looks at me shrewdly. “Tell that to the angels you killed. Oh, wait, you can’t—because they’re _dead_!”

I frown. “How do you know about that?”

She shrugs and turns her back on me, her attention returning to the something I can’t see. I let her ignore me, taking the opportunity to observe the way her dress has become quite snug under the arms. When I first found her hiding place in Heaven, Laura Jean LaMotte was swimming in swathes of eyelet bright as sunshine. Now it barely covers her knobby knees, and there is a new swelling distending the contour of her flank, which even last week or a few months from now was as narrow as a sapling bow. Her hair has grown down past her waist, though it was a tidy bob when she was seven. Now it’s full of twigs and bits of butterfly and dandelion seeds. She’s turning into an untended garden. A patch of meadow overgrown with weeds. Soon I won’t be able to find her at all.

“You’re growing up,” I tell her, and she flinches. I’m really good at making people do that. “Pretty soon, I’ll have to bring you a new dress.”

“This is Heaven,” she mutters. “I can have a new dress any time I want.”

“Then why don’t you?” I ask. “Go on. Show me.”

She squeezes her eyes mutinously shut, and clenches her fists. I can hear her teeth grinding like three-dozen slipped gears. At first I think she’s throwing one of her famous temper tantrums, but then I realize she’s just trying really hard. A vein in her head pulses like a star trying not to die. She bites her lip so hard blood wells up in the space where her tooth used to be. The tooth I carried in my pocket until I lost my coat in the lake. When Dean gave it back to me, Laura Jean’s tooth was gone. It slipped through one of the many holes I've made in this dun-coloured fabric before I had a chance to heal it up like it, too, is just another patch of the fragile skin I've borrowed here.

I wait patiently, watching her mind begin to implode. Nothing happens. Just like I knew it wouldn’t. She gives up, panting, gasping for the breath she wishes she didn’t need.

“You’ve got no juice,” I tell her. “No Mojo. You used it all coming here, and staying so much longer than I ever thought you could. Pretty soon you’ll be so weak you’ll have to go back.”

Her eyes fly open. “I can’t!” she whispers hoarsely. “I don’t belong there anymore. And my body—it’s all…”

“Grown up,” I supply. “Yes. You’re a woman now, Laura Jean LaMotte.”

She turns very, very pale. So pale she actually looks as dead as she wants to be, and I almost believe the story she’s made up for herself. But when I reach out and very gently take her wrist in mine, where the growing pains are the worst, I can feel her pulse racing between my finger and my thumb. Laura Jean is very much alive. Her blood gallops through her veins like Brumbies in Australia. I should know. I helped to create them. Australia, too.

“Where are we, anyway?” I ask her, looking around. “I don’t recognize this place.”

She doesn’t say anything for a very long time, and then, just when I most think she isn’t going to, she says it. “Neverland.”

I nod, like I know where that is. And maybe, somewhere inside of me, somewhere that isn’t mine but still belongs to Jimmy Novak, I do. “You stole it, Laura Jean. Neverland isn’t yours. Not yet.” Her hand tenses in mine, but I keep on holding it tight enough to hurt. I look into her face for so long she can’t help finally returning my gaze. She knows I have eternity. She knows she doesn’t. “But it can be,” I tell her, nodding at the meadow, to the little house with the curly chimney that still thinks it’s a tree. “All of this, yours.”

“For keeps?”

I nod. “But you have to do something for me. You have to help me, and I’ll help you.”

She stares at me, frowning, for a very long time. She stares at me for a dozen yesterdays, and seven tomorrows. She stares so long I feel like Eternity has shed months like a thousand dead leaves. “Only if you say it,” she says, finally. “And you have to _mean_ it.”

I hesitate only for one split second, which, here, is at least a week, but she waits without moving. “I do believe in fairies,” I recite, in my grating monotone. I think of Dean as I say it, as if I’m talking about him. That way, it isn’t a lie. “I do. I do.”

I clap my hands together, twice. The sound reverberates through the meadow like a broken bell.


End file.
